I Satisfied Myself As Well As I Could, And I Am Very Easy To
Satisfy, With My Drive Through The
Pleasant town, which is entirely
Italian in effect, with its people standing about or looking out of
their windows in
Their Sunday leisure, and quite Roman in the
cleanliness of its streets. I took due pleasure in the unfinished
exterior of the Oceanographic Museum and the newly finished interior of
the Monaco Cathedral. The cathedral, which is so new as to make one
rejoice that most other cathedrals are old, is of a glaring freshness,
but is very handsome; somehow in spite of its newness it contains the
tombs of the reigning family, and perhaps it has only been newly done
over. The museum which is ultimately to be the greatest of its kind in
the world, already contains somewhere in its raw inaccessible recesses
the collections made by Prince Albert in his many cruises, and is of a
palatiality worthy of a sovereign with a tenant so generous and prompt
in its rent as the Administration of the Casino of Monte Carlo.
This fact, namely, that the princely grandeur and splendor of Monaco all
came out of the gaming-tables, was something that the driver of my
landau made me observe, when our intimacy had mounted with our road, and
we paused for the magnificent view of the sea from the headland near the
museum. He was otherwise a shrewd and conversible Piedmontese who did
not make me pay much above the tariff, and who had pity on my poor
French after awhile, and consented to speak Italian with me. In the sort
of French glare over the whole local civilization of the principality,
everybody will wish to seem Erench, but after you break through the
surface, the natives will be as comfortably and endearingly Italian as
anybody in the peninsula. Among themselves they speak a Ligurian patois,
but with the stranger they will use an Italian easily much better than
his, and also much better than their own French. I think they prefer you
in their racial parlance after you have shown some knowledge of it, and
two kind women of whom I asked my way in Monte Carlo, one day when I was
trying for the station of the funicular to Turbia, grew more volubly
kind when I asked it in such Tuscan as I could command. That station is
really not hard to find when once you know where it is, and at three
o'clock in the afternoon I was mounting the precipitous incline of the
alp on whose summit Augustus divided Italy from Gaul, and left the
stupendous trophy which one sees there in ruins to-day.
I should like to render the sense of my upward progress dramatic by
pretending that we mounted from a zone of flowers at Monte Carlo into
regions where only the hardiest blossoms greeted us, but what I really
noticed was that by-and-by the little patches of vineyard seemed to grow
less and the olive-trees scraggier.
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